


Out of Gas. Out of Road. Out of Time.

by De_Nugis



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-22
Updated: 2012-11-22
Packaged: 2017-11-19 06:46:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/570382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/De_Nugis/pseuds/De_Nugis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam and Dean stop for a year. They always get a year.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Out of Gas. Out of Road. Out of Time.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Though no archive warnings apply, the fic does contain descriptions of killing animals (for food, but with some admixture of purgatory/hell issues).
> 
> 2\. Written for the spn_reversebang 2012, for [sophiap's art](http://sophiap.livejournal.com/244478.html).
> 
> 3\. Contains light spoilers for aired eps of s8, though it is a future AU.
> 
> 4\. Thanks to ratherastory for the beta.

Some time way back, Sam can’t even remember when, he’d downloaded a Guide to Birds app. He’d gone for broke, the songs and everything, but he’d never used it much. Maybe if it had had a section for steel-feathered flesheaters. Even in Texas, though, with Amelia, he’d never really used it. And now his iPhone hasn’t worked in almost a year. The angels ended Apple. Impressive. 

Even without his long gone app, though, Sam knows red-winged blackbirds. They’re highway dwellers, ubiquitous. The Winchester version of backyard birds. The wheezy, unconcerned whistles in the reeds are as familiar as the sound of Dean tinkering with the engine, one last time. 

Sam turns his back on the shimmer of green and water and walks over to Dean. Dean’s hands still. Then he sets the wrench carefully down on the toolbox.

“Don’t think you can fix her so she won’t run on gas, dude,” says Sam. 

“Fuck it,” says Dean, and swipes his hand across his mouth. “Let’s roll her off the road, Sammy.”

Sam sets his shoulder to the car, glances at Dean. He half expects Dean to steer her towards the far side of the road, tip her into the reedy mud, let her sink and be gone. But Dean pushes towards the solid ground. She comes to rest maybe thirty yards from the road, in a thicket of saplings. She’s not exactly hidden, but there’s no one around any more. No one can steal her, anyway. Not without gas.

Dean’s panting a little from the exertion. The red-winged blackbirds are still carrying on. Otherwise it’s quiet. The distant billows of smoke are little more than a reddened smudge on the horizon, almost bucolic. Without sound effects, with only the background chatter of the blackbirds, the distant destruction is just part of the landscape. There are raw yellow gashes in the saplings’ bark, beaded with sap where the car scraped past them, but they’ll heal.

Dean’s got the trunk open. They’ve had the backpacks packed for weeks now, months, for whenever this was coming. The last of their bottled water. The last of their weapons.

Dean hands Sam his, shoulders his own, shuts the trunk with a firm slam.

“Let’s get walking,” he says.

They’ve been ready for this. And Sam’s been waiting. It’s familiar, this decisive lightness, different this time, but familiar. You drive till you hit a dog. You drive till you run out of gas. You roll the dice and you stop where they fall.

Amelia is probably dead. Riot is probably dead. Almost everyone is.

Dean no doubt thinks the same, sometimes, about Lisa and Ben.

“Let’s not,” Sam says. He’s been ready for this. 

 

Of course they have to walk some. There were houses near the road, but they’re charred cellar holes, thorny clumps of blackberry already rooted in them, bright green with delicate new leaves. It’s five miles from the road, up a rutted track overgrown with weeds, that they find a place the angels missed, or spared. It can be hard to tell. Their own survival doesn’t feel like either. More like a snub, really. The house is small and dingy white, but there’s a big garden running wild and a small field of corn, already getting tall. And a goat. No, make that five. 

At no point in Sam’s life did he download a guide to goats.

“We’ll stay a week,” says Dean. “A week, then we move on.” 

Sam doesn’t say anything. He starts planning.

 

If the goats haven’t wandered off in the last year, he figures, they can wait a while to have their pen rebuilt. He’s going to clear the garden first. Maybe by then Dean will be up for building the pen. Sam’s never been great at carpentry. 

They’d salvaged three boxes of books from one of Bobby’s stashes. For all the answers they contain, they might as well have burned them. Not that being on topic would have helped much, probably. Chances are Pseudo-Dionysius had nothing to say about why Naomi and her pals started burning cities, emptied the countryside in a meticulously censused rapture.

Thirteen of them are in Japanese. Who knows if anyone’s left in Japan, even; the books sure as fuck aren’t any good to Sam. He keeps them anyway. One day someone may find them. Nine of them are in Latin, which is fine. They even salvaged a dictionary. They don’t have much use for the bestiary these days. The angels cleared out the monsters first. The Vatican mythographers won’t help, either. But Vergil, now. Harpies are unlikely, ventures into the Underworld unnecessary and going to remain that way, but Sam has time at this point to read the boring stuff, the didactic bits that never touched their world. He has nothing but time. 

He starts the _Georgics_. He is on a farm, after all. He should read a poem about farming. It’s not as helpful as he might have hoped. Even after he looks the plant names up he has no clue what they are, if they even grow here. The English names are as bare of association as the Latin. But this is the closest thing he’s got to a guide, to a map of what’s left, what’s next.

Five days. Dean paces and twitches. Sam inventories the contents of the house and reads and wishes he could Google the damn plants.

“So last we heard Kevin was in Utah,” Dean says at his shoulder.

Sam bookmarks his place and closes the book, halfway through common threshing floor pests. It’s getting dark anyway. The house is pretty well stocked, candles and kerosene, but when it’s gone there won’t be any more. 

“A year ago, Dean,” he says. “And it would probably take us a year to walk there. And he’d be gone.” Sam’s intimately familiar with the empty spaces people have disappeared from. He doesn’t need a cross-country odyssey to revisit them.

“So what?” says Dean. “Beats hanging out here while what’s left of the world ends. You’re seriously going to sit on your ass and do nothing?”

“I’m not going to sit on my ass,” says Sam, “I’m going to make us a threshing floor.” Though one husks corn, right? Threshing may be irrelevant to their needs.

Dean’s jaw is set. He’s vibrating with the tension that’s underlain him since purgatory. Sam envies it a little.

“Well, I’m not,” he says. “I mean it, Sam. I’m not going to lie down and die. That’s not what we do.”

 _It’s what you do_ , Sam wants to retort. But Dean’s not really trying to die, not any more, though part of Sam is always going to be tuned to that particular pitch of fear. And it’s not like not being suicidal is going to stop Dean from getting himself killed. Proactive Dean is almost worse, that way.

Sam only has one chance to pitch this. He has to get it right. He stands, because he’ll use it, height and bulk, against Dean, if it’s to save him. He betrayed Dean with this, this damn thing about roots that he has, and he’ll still use it.

“I’ll go,” he says. “If you walk out that door, I’ll go with you. I’ll walk to Utah on what we know is a wild goose chase. Or I’ll walk as far as we get, because you know damn well we wouldn’t make it. But I want to stay. Not to lie down and die. To settle down and live. For a while, at least. I want you to stay. To stay with me.”

“This again?” says Dean. “What, the apocalypse, the real deal, that’s just another ticket for you to get out? That’s really what you want? What you want to do?”

Sam does want it, that’s the hell of it. He can’t pretend he doesn’t. He can’t let that divert him, either.

“It’s what I want us to do,” he says. “For a year. Give it a year. That’s what we always get, right? Then we can reevaluate. Just give me a year. You know he’s not going to be in Utah, anyway. We’re not losing time, doing this. You know that, Dean.”

Dean hesitates, stubborn and on edge. It could fall either way. After all, what Sam said is blatantly false. They’d lose a year, Sam would be gaining a year. 

Then Dean sighs.

“Right,” he says. “You and me and the car. Guess I can live with that. That’s what it’s always been. If she figures this is the time and the place, I’ll give it a year.”

“What am I,” says Sam, “Chopped liver?” 

But it’s all right, Dean’s in. Settling down for the damn car, true, but it’s the first time in three years that Dean’s stopped moving.

Sam goes back doggedly to the _Georgics_. Somewhere in this damn tedious poem Vergil is going to tell him how one looks after goats. Meanwhile Sam thinks the flat place by the tumbledown barn might do for a threshing floor

Dean goes off, sometimes, and sits with the car. It’s still the only place he can be still. At home he paces when he talks, paces when he reads, fidgets, lies down only to sleep. But he’s still there. And when Sam hikes down to where the leaves are growing thick and dark over the Impala he sometimes finds Dean sprawled on the hood, eyes crinkled against the sun, not even drumming his fingers.

Those times Sam vows he’ll find hops and barley (what do hops look like, anyway?) and reinvent beer.

 

Sam contemplates a goat. He interrupted her while she was methodically stripping bark from the lower branches of what Sam hopes is an apple tree. 

She stares at him. Her gaze is malevolent. Devilish, by tradition. Maybe she should by rights worship Sam. He’s Lucifer’s vessel, after all. 

She doesn’t seem inclined to, though. She doesn’t look like a symbolic creature. Just a scrawny survivor, having a pretty good day, bark and sun. Sam reaches out cautiously, runs a hand down the ridge of her neck, over her ribs. She doesn’t run off. She must still remember humans.

“Hope you’re not thinking of cooking her,” says Dean from behind him, “Goat’s bony shit.” 

It’ll probably come to that. They’ll need meat. Though Dean’s right, she’s bony. Five goats won’t get them that much in the way of stew. And there are deer in the woods. So far they’ve avoided hunting of the not supernatural kind, but they’re settled now. They won’t be finding more abandoned supermarkets to raid. Sooner or later compunctions about Bambi will have to give way to survival. 

“We could keep them for milk,” Sam says. “Maybe we could figure out how to make cheese.”

Dean snorts. 

“We’re living in a post-apocalyptic wilderness, and you want goat cheese. Unbelievable. You growing arugula in that garden of yours?”

For all Sam knows, yes. There’s definitely some leafy green stuff.

“That garden of ours,” he corrects. “I’m gonna let you do the fertilizing, come time, with goat dung. That’s another thing we can keep her for.” Sam has no clue, really, whether goat dung is good for gardens. Vergil hasn’t told him anything on the subject. But he’s a hundred percent sure working goat dung into the soil will be good for Dean.

“Well, there went your chances of me building your friends here a pen,” says Dean, but he’s already measuring with his eyes, calculating space against the pile of boards in the woodshed. He strides back to the house with a purposeful walk, returns with the tool chest that now lives by the stove, displaced from its neat nest in the Impala’s trunk. Dean must have been down to the car again. They could have cleared the trunk in a couple of trips, the two of them, but that’s not how Dean’s been doing it. He’ll bring back a weapon or two at a time, a stray book that must have fallen out of its crate and lodged in a corner (it’s not _Uncle Ebenezer’s Guide to Goat-Keeping_ , alas), an old jacket of Sam’s. One thing at a time.

Summer has settled in, and the days are hot and long. Dean finishes the goat pen. All the time he’s working on it Sam can hear him from where he’s crouched in the garden, weeding, neck bent at a crick-inducing angle and roasting in the sun. It’s hard for Dean to work quietly these days, but at least now his restlessness is working itself out in whistling and banging and the constant soft patter he keeps up to cajole the goats. It’s a nice change from violent outbursts and starting at sudden noises. And Sam likes the noise, blending with the chuck and whirr of the red-winged blackbirds that nest in the reeds by their small, muddy pond.

 

Farming is hard. Vergil emphasizes that, so maybe Sam should be warned, but he doesn’t think Vergil did much hands on dirt grubbing himself. And if Vergil knew any farmers personally, which is, in Sam’s view, doubtful – he imagines the old bore would have been about as popular as Dad was with his shotgun-wielding friends -- they weren’t handicapped by apocalypse. They knew what the hell they were doing. They could keep someone alive, keep themselves alive, keep something safe. Survive.

Sam’s retired them by force or fiat, but there’s always war. Sam fights endless skirmishes with the goats. They keep escaping the pen, getting into the garden. Sam names them after devils. Not any of the ones they know; he takes names from Bobby’s battered _Paradise Lost_. He gets resigned to working with Belial chewing at his shoulder. Sam feeds him surreptitious crusts of the flavorless flatbread that’s stretching out their diminishing store of flour. Belial chews with his head cocked, fixing Sam calmly with his domesticated, sinister gaze. Sam scratches his head. 

Some of the plants turn out to be broccoli. Sam spends half his time, it feels like, picking caterpillars off them. Hunting garden pests, saving plants. The family business. 

Apparently Sam isn’t very good at it. Damn caterpillars are the same color as the stems. It’s not Sam’s fault, it really isn’t, that he misses one when he’s steaming. 

“Sam,” says Dean quietly, “Look at my fork. Tell me what you see.”

Sam inspects the limp green object on Dean’s fork. It looks like a bit of broccoli stem, except for the double row of stubby legs, revolting and pathetic. Sam did this.

“I steamed a caterpillar,” he says. “I can’t believe I steamed a caterpillar.” 

Dean snorts. 

“I don’t think the caterpillar is the victim here, Sammy,” he says. “ _You fed me boiled caterpillar_. Let’s concentrate on that for a moment.”

Sam drags his eyes away from the caterpillar he’d boiled alive to Dean’s disgusted, pissed off face.

“It’s protein,” says Sam. Not like he was meaning to feed Dean caterpillars. But a couple of cases of protein bars and cans of tuna, looted from the last grocery store, months back, those and Sam’s unripe crop of beans, that isn’t going to be enough. They’ll need meat.

“Protein,” says Dean with loathing. “I didn’t eat in Purgatory, you know, didn’t eat the whole damn year. Now I’ve got your Betty Crocker bleeding heart caterpillar cuisine, those are starting to seem like good times.”

Dean and his fucking best-vacation-ever purgatory camping trip. Sam goes into the pantry, rummages up two of the remaining protein bars. “You’re here now,” he says, slapping them down on the table in front of Dean. “You’re here now, and you’re staying. So you eat.” Dean looks at them.

“Peanut butter,” he says. “You hoarding the chocolate ones for you?” But he tears off the wrapper and eats.

It’s not like Sam doesn’t get where Dean’s coming from. When he goes out to the garden the next day and picks off the first caterpillar of the morning his stomach turns on a memory of hospital sandwiches crawling with maggots. It gets so quiet here, it gets so quiet at night. It gets so quiet in the world. There are days Sam finds himself listening for Lucifer. It’s when he doesn’t hear him that the panic sets in, a faint hiss of static. 

He turns his attention to cabbages. Dean is inside, right there, fixing up the house. If Sam concentrates he can hear the faint slam of his hammer. Now that they’re here, committed, Dean’s fixing up the house. Maybe he’s OK with dying doing something, even if it’s nothing more than failing to survive the winter. It’s Sam’s mind that seems to run on an endless string of distracted calculations, round and round on the silence, like a hamster on a wheel.

It’s lucky they have the wood stove, and there’s wood in the woodshed enough to last them the year. Sam thinks it’s enough. But if the one year becomes two, becomes permanent, they’ll have to cut more. It’s going to be tough. Do they even have an ax? No chainsaws. And he’s got to pickle some of this cabbage somehow, he can’t blackmail Dean into settling, then let him get scurvy. There’s a mouse-chewed copy of _The Joy of Cooking_ in the house’s kitchen – better than finding another Word of God, certainly better than Publius Vergilius fucking Maro – but its directives on canning are more terrifying than instructive. He can’t blackmail Dean into settling and then give him botulism trying to save him from scurvy. He can imagine, instantly, vividly, the silence of this place if Dean were gone. If Dean’s heart weren’t beating somewhere in the house. If Dean were gone.

His hands were in the dirt, they were in the dirt in the garden but now there’s cloth in them. Flannel, worn and frayed. They’ll need clothes. Eventually they’ll need clothes, and what the fuck is Sam supposed to do, learn how to weave goat hair? His hands are grabbing cloth and Dean’s heart is beating under his fist and he was in the garden, but now he’s got Dean shoved up against the wall of the kitchen and they’re going to need clothes. They’re going to need clothes and Sam has to figure out how to can cabbage so Dean doesn’t get scurvy.

“What the ever living fuck?” says Dean. He sounds a little strangled, but more concerned than angry. “Sam?”

Sam leans his forehead against Dean’s, rests so they’re breathing warmly on each other’s mouths.

“I need you to be safe,” he says. 

“Hence the assaulting me while I’m hammering nails in a world with no tetanus boosters,” says Dean mildly, but he drops the nails and grips Sam’s shoulder instead. Sam eases up a little, lets Dean breathe, but he goes on talking because there’s something he’s never explained, he’s never confessed, and winter is coming and its easy to lose people in the silence, in the snow.

“I need you to be safe,” he says, “I mean it. But here’s the thing, here’s the kicker, Dean. _I_ need to be safe. Maybe more than I need you to be safe. Maybe even more. Dead’s safe. When you were dead, really dead, I was safe. First damn time in years I haven’t been about to lose you. I need you to be safe.”

“Are you telling me you were better off with me dead?” says Dean. He doesn’t sound angry any more. A bit affronted, but mostly curious. 

“I don’t know,” says Sam, “Maybe. But you’d better not fucking die. No scurvy.” He leans in and bites Dean’s lower lip, an exact nip. Then he pulls back. There’s an old box of kleenex on the counter, half shredded by mice and revolting. They’ve never got around to throwing it out. Sam takes one and wipes his eyes on it and tosses it away. His nose is stuffed. He takes another kleenex.

“What the hell was that about?” says Dean, watching him.

“Cabbages,” says Sam. He blows his nose. This is probably one of the last kleenexes on earth. It’s melodramatic and satisfying, blowing his nose on it. “We’re going to can cabbages. Or pickle them or something. So we don’t get scurvy.”

“They’d better not have any caterpillars on them, is all I’m saying,” says Dean. “I’m not living through the winter on caterpillars, Sammy. I don’t care if they if they did it on Little House on the fucking Prairie.”

“All right, all right,” says Sam. “See if I care when you die of protein deficiency.” He throws out the last kleenex and goes back to the garden. He's got a month or two left before harvest time.

 

They do need meat. Sam’s not letting Dean die of any protein deficiency. He figures he can smoke it, make jerky. The woods are full of deer. It’s November, already, maybe around Thanksgiving. Sam’s garden is bare, bedded down under corn stalks. There are bins in the cellar full of potatoes and cabbages, carrots and onions and beets. Winter vegetables. If they don’t keep, if there’s not enough, there are jars, rows and rows on the shelves. They’ve piled brush around the goat pen, extra insulation, already dusted with snow. Back when there were game laws and people this was hunting season.

“So this is it,” says Sam. “We finally take down a deer. Shoot our own dinner. Too bad Bobby’s not here to see.”

“A lot of people aren’t here,” says Dean. “Pretty much everyone isn’t here.” His voice is curt, warning Sam off.

Sam shuts up. He can’t explain to Dean how he finds it soothing sometimes, thinking about the people who died _before_. It’s solid, at least. Sam knows what happened to them, where they are. With all the others, the ones where he doesn’t know, it’s hard to stay still. Hard not to take off again, to drive, not looking, just casting, like Riot when she’d lost a scent. Drive till he hits a dog. Drive till he whites out in the silent drifts by the highway. 

But they’re out of gas and the car is half buried in fallen leaves, sinking imperceptibly into the loam, and Dean is here. 

Dean’s here but he’s somewhere else, slipping through the trees. He was always good at tracking, hunts with Dad, hunting with Bobby, but he’d never sunk into it like this. When they were kids, with Bobby, half his attention had always been on Sam, rolling his eyes if a twig snapped under Sam’s sneakers, snapping branches back into Sam’s forehead, his face a silent running commentary, obnoxious and endlessly entertaining. Sam remembers watching Dean's face more than he remembers the deer tracks and blazed trees Bobby had pointed out. 

Now Dean’s drifted away from Sam, off to the left where the trees are thicker, dense evergreens solid among the attenuated deciduous trunks. Sam can’t hear him, can barely see him. The light is growing, as much a pallid radiance in the snow as a brightening in the sky. There’s a shadow slipping between the trees that’s fallow instead of grey, and a flash of white. Deer. Sam whistles softly, warning Dean, and raises his bow. But a dark blur overtakes the white-spotted tan of the deer, Dean, crouched, running low and silent. He hooks an arm around the deer’s neck, pulls its throat back, a line of white, and draws a knife across it. Dark blood splashes steaming on the snow. Dean grunts and lowers the body to the ground. The hooves twitch and go still. 

Sam draws reluctantly up to Dean’s shoulder – he’s killed monsters, for God’s sake, he’s killed _people_ , he came this close to ending the world a few years early. He’s not squeamish about gutting a deer. They need meat. But Dean has already slid the knife under the skin by the creature’s sternum and drawn it across the belly in one smooth stroke. Guts spill out hot and glistening and Sam chokes at the smell. 

“At least it’s not Empire Strikes Back,” he says. “We don’t have to crawl in.”

He doesn’t have to feel bad for reminding Dean of the apocalyptic loss of the Lucas oeuvre, because Dean’s not listening. He’s staring, mesmerized. He pokes with the tip of the knife at a coil of intestine, delicately, not breaking the membrane. He lays out the slithering loop in a perfect circle, starts on another. He’s humming. 

“Hey,” says Sam sharply, “Dean.”

They’re supposed to be away from all of this, damn it. Sam’s supposed to be the one who knows how to run. What’s the use of it, running away, over and over, if he can’t hide Dean. He wraps a hand cautiously around Dean’s wrist. 

“Dean,” he says again, quietly this time. “Dean, come back.” Dean stays rigid a few moments. Then he relaxes. His eyes focus. His face twists and he drops the knife, stumbles away a few steps from the carcass and slumps down in the snow, facing a snow-bowed hemlock, clumps of unbroken white. He’s still shaking in the grip of whatever memory. Sam can guess well enough, for all the use that is. He hovers at Dean’s shoulder.

“You want deer jerky, next time you hunt for it,” Dean says hoarsely, at last. He smears a hand across the dirt on his face, leaving a sticky streak of red, makes a faint guttural sound.

Sam kneels down a careful foot away, scoops up a shallow handful of snow, holds it against his cheek and lips, breathing on it till it melts. His face goes numb with the cold. He reaches, slow, for Dean, cleans his right hand, then his left, dries them as best he can on his jacket before pulling Dean’s mittens back on. Then he leans forward and rubs icy water over Dean’s cheekbone, under his eye, till the smear of blood is gone. Dean’s pupils are huge, his breath harsh and uneven. Sam pulls his forehead down against his shoulder.

“Hey,” Sam says into Dean’s ear. “It’s just a deer, OK? Just a deer. We’re safe. We’ve stopped. We’re safe.” 

And he means it. There’s no way back into hell, not out of this jumbled wilderness of snowy woods and burnt out cities. They’re lost. They’re safe. They can thank the angels for that. And Sam does. 

“Get off me, you freakish oaf,” says Dean, pulling back and batting Sam’s hands away. He stands up and turns, starts to trudge back towards the house, moving noisily, plowing a ragged track in the shallow snow. He doesn’t look back. Sam follows, dragging the bloody deer. Hell, purgatory, whatever, they need meat.

 

It’s pretty edible, a tough jerky bitter and dark from the improvised smokehouse Sam sketched and Dean built. Dean eats it, He doesn’t seem bothered. Sam hunts two or three mornings a week till the snow gets too deep. Dean makes to roll out of bed and pull on his boots when Sam leaves in the dark mornings, but he lets Sam push him back. When Sam gets home there’ll be a fire in the woodstove and a breakfast of potatoes boiled in goat’s milk. 

The store of meat grows respectable. Sam gets used to it, the gutting and cleaning, the cloudy, reproachful eyes. 

 

Winter is hard. Harder than farming, though most days there’s not a hell of a lot to do.

Sam sets rabbit snares. Bobby showed him how to do that, too. Vergil’s fucking useless. Italy. No numbing winter. Sam feels no compunction when his fingers find the quick heartbeats under trembling fur before he wrings the necks with a sharp twist. Stew. Hats for him and Dean. Better mittens. They can’t afford frostbite.

They keep the paths clear to the woodshed, the goat pen, their primitive outhouse. The potatoes and onions and cabbages are dwindling in the deep bins down cellar. They’re going to use up the house’s stock of emergency candles, just hauling them up. They’ll have to try to figure out how to make candles this summer, if they make it, if they stay. Tallow. Beeswax and tallow. Sam can find a beehive, maybe, though the prospect isn’t enticing, but he’s not even sure what tallow is. Some kind of fat?

Some days Sam wants to cry, walking to the goatshed, just from the scouring wind, from his cracked, bleeding hands, the endless routine. Some days he thinks a lot about Kermit, Texas. Some days he presses his shoulder to Dean’s, huddling for warmth, and feels like he’s home, like this random abandoned farmhouse is the axis of the world.

Dean is gaunt but cheerful. They wrestle and spar daily in the crowded living room, keeping fit. Dean wins casually, almost every day, but there’s no edge to it. In the afternoons Dean experiments obstinately with their monotonous diet and cooks up endless corn mash for the goats. The goats can get by on twigs, probably, but it seems like they should have something hot. The kitchen fills with sweetish, bland steam. When Sam carries it out to them Belial and Asmodea jostle eagerly at the bucket. Sam stays with them while they eat, basking in the warmth of the dim, smelly shed.

At night Sam and Dean sit in front of the stove, dark except the flicker of firelight where Dean has lifted one of the burners, wrapped in the big down quilt from the bed upstairs, and argue endlessly and stupidly. What state it was where Dad killed the Ewah. Whether to try roasting the dried apples. “They’re _dried_ , moron.” Spiderman vs Batman. Purgatory vs earth vs hell vs heaven.

It feels comfortable, familiar. The two of them huddled close for survival. The kitchen is small, but it’s bigger than the car, down under the drifts at the road. Sam bites and kisses his way down Dean’s neck, grapples him close, before they sleep, and for a few minutes it’s all grunts and sharp sweat, Dean pinning him, and Sam’s coming, hot and defiant against the cold and the dark. Dean sleeps deeply afterward, no nightmares. That part’s familiar, too. The back seat. Not often. But there’s no one left to care, no one watching.

Waking up is grungy. They reek. Sam would kill – not bunnies, actual murder – for a shower. He sponges off in snow melted on the stove. Another day. They’re starting to get longer.

 

Sam takes a walk down to the car, the first warm day. The snow has been gone for a while, but this is the first time he’s felt the sun on his neck. The ground is pure mud; he sinks ankle deep at each step. One day they’re going to need new shoes.

Usually walking out to the car is Dean’s routine. But sometimes Sam likes to look at her, too. Last year’s withered goldenrod is knee deep around her, and there’s new green starting at Sam’s feet. There’s a scatter of acorns and moldering leaves across the damp seats, tiny seedlings sprouting in the rotting leather. They’ll die, not enough soil. Only the driver’s seat is clear, where Dean sits sometimes.

Sam turns to stroll back towards the house, but there’s a noise behind him. A shout. A human voice, not Dean’s. It’s so strange to hear it that he thinks of his bird app again. The common red-winged blackbird, the rare human voice. 

“Sam,” calls the human voice. Kevin’s. It’s Kevin. Bearded and ragged, voice deepened to baritone.

Well, Sam got his year, almost. And Dean’s still here. Sam can live with that, with remembering that, when they're back on the road. And he's made this place, him and Dean, to come back to.

Kevin’s got tablets, of course, and angels tracking him, and a way to end this. The whole nine yards, starting up again. Back on the road.

They bury the tablets in a tin box by the roots of the apple tree. Kevin knows them by heart, but they may need to be there, for the next prophet, the next Sam and Dean. Sam slips Bobby’s dog-eared Vergil in with them. Maybe they’ll come back some day and dig it up.

The goats nose around, stripping bark from the trunk. Belial butts Sam’s thigh. Sam scratches his head one last time.

“Maybe we’ll be back,” he tells him.

When Dean slaps the rusting hood of the Impala as they walk out onto the highway, Sam thinks he’s saying the same thing. By the time they see her again the saplings might be a thicket. Birds might fly through broken windows, pull the stuffing from the seats, nest behind the wheels.


End file.
